Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian
English conceptual Artist Gillian Wearing placed an advert in a popular magazine bearing the title of this work as its wording in 1994. She then filmed the people who responded, while wearing masks, confessing deep and very private secrets on camera. The result was a half an hour long video, that it seems is very difficult to watch during a global pandemic. unfortunately, I have not been able to find it anywhere online to watch during the global pandemic, though I do feel through my research I have been able to get a good idea of the how the film would play out.
From the description provided by the Tate gallery website, it seems this film is quite raw in its aesthetics and overall style. Shot on a betacam, and with visuals harshly lit of ordinary people wearing bizarre face coverings and masks (Somewhat topical for the time of writing this blog) I must imagine it almost comes of as sordid, which I would imagine given the nature of the content is somewhat the point, and fits in quite well with the nature of my own work. Indeed, some of the comments made by the subjects appear to have been highly sexual, in an interview with Bomb Magazine (Turner, 1998) Wearing remarks " I elicited people’s confessions but I didn’t know what they were going to say. I didn’t know their remarks would be so sexually orientated".
In "An Introduction To Film Studies" Nelmes describes how "Wearing uses photography and video to interrogate the boundaries of collusion and collaboration in the revelation of private and public identities" (Nelmes, 2003) and this is evident with "Confess all on video..." (1994) in how she uses the raw nature of a Betacam so bring veritlity and sincerity to the subjects, despite there use of strange masks and face covering. In fact, the use of the masks goes someone way in and of itself to aid this, in that the subject is presented as if to believe they are totally anonymous, so why would they lie? It bears a similarity to the work of Luvera who also gave a level of power over his subjects representation to his subject, which in turn lent his work a sort of truthfulness that a simple documentary style project could not contain.
Nelmes, J., 2003. An Introduction To Film Studies. London: Routledge, p.207.
Hodge. 2015. ‘Confess All On Video. Don’T Worry You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian Version II’, Gillian Wearing CBE, 1994 | Tate. [online] Available at: <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wearing-confess-all-on-video-dont-worry-you-will-be-in-disguise-intrigued-call-gillian-t07447> [Accessed 27 July 2020].
Wearing, G. 1994. Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian. [video] Directed by G. Wearing. London: Gillian Wearing.
Turner, G., 1998. Gillian Wearing By Grady T. Turner - BOMB Magazine. [online] Bombmagazine.org. Available at: <https://bombmagazine.org/articles/gillian-wearing/> [Accessed 27 July 2020].
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